Trying to Make the Pen As Mighty as the Sword; A New Workshop Turns Warriors Into Writers

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: August 4, 2004

JACKSONVILLE, N.C., July 30—
In her tiny voice, Bobbie Ann Mason was comparing herself to the protagonist of her 1985 novel, ''In Country'': a young girl growing up in Kentucky during the Vietnam War. She was speaking to a couple of dozen people here at Camp Lejeune, a handful of marines and family members of marines. This was a writer's workshop, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and Ms. Mason was reminded of Sam, her character, because they both share a hunger for information about strife in a faraway land.

''I think we all want to know what it's like,'' Ms. Mason said, as the marines bent forward in their classroom seats to hear her. War, she meant. Iraq, she meant.

''Let's start with the sand,'' Ms. Mason said. ''I've been thinking about the sand. I'm wondering, how do you describe that sand?'' Off to the side in the front row, Staff Sgt. Steven Sparks, about to embark on his second tour of duty in Iraq, raised his hand and described a sensation of time travel, the strangeness of crossing a biblical plain in a 21st-century military vehicle.

''It was so ancient, so old,'' he said.

It was a small, electric moment, as if literature had leapt from the page and danced. And it was precisely the kind of moment that the arts endowment hopes to create again and again with its new writing program, which seeks to address a seeming cultural paradox. War stories, after all, occupy one of literature's longest, weightiest shelves, and American fighting men, from Ulysses S. Grant to Anthony Swofford, have set down their battle-forged memoirs, but these days the military and literary worlds barely overlap.

''These are two parts of society that don't ordinarily talk to each other,'' said Dana Gioia, the endowment chairman. ''And we thought, what would happen if we got them in a conversation?''

The program, called ''Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience,'' is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring (Camp Lejeune was the second stop; the first was Fort Drum in upstate New York in June), with a formidable roster of participating writers selected by an independent panel of editors appointed by the endowment. It includes military thriller heavyweights like Jeff Shaara and Tom Clancy, as well as prominent literary lights like Tobias Wolff and Richard Bausch.

The program, which will cost about $500,000, is being paid for almost entirely by the Boeing Company. And the Defense Department (an unlikely-seeming bedfellow for the endowment, which is also providing $1 million for a program that will take productions of Shakespeare to military bases) is providing logistical services.

''I think the program is stupendous,'' said Maj. Gen. Douglas V. O'Dell, the commanding general of the Marines' antiterrorist brigade, who addressed one of the workshops here and who said he wrote poetry himself, though he didn't volunteer to recite any. ''It's extremely valuable for its cathartic possibilities, and I hope it will give a voice to what's going to be, in my opinion, a greater generation than the one Tom Brokaw wrote about.''

At Camp Lejeune, a sprawling base that is home to 40,000 marines, the workshops were taught by Ms. Mason; another novelist, Erin McGraw; and a poet, Andrew Hudgins. They partly conformed to the image of the visiting-writer workshop that traumatizes visiting writers at colleges, Kiwanis Clubs and bookstore talk-backs.

There were the familiar, irrelevant questions: How do you find an agent? How do you decide whether to write a poem or a story? Should I submit my writing simultaneously to more than one publication? And the writers dispensed the tried-and-true advice that has been dispensed to fledgling writers since time immemorial: Be specific. Write every day.

Still, you couldn't help recognizing that the endowment program, even in fledgling form, did its work, bridging the cultural divide not only by bringing actual writers in contact with actual soldiers, sailors and marines, but also by impressing on the people who are hungry to tell about the war that there are many people who are hungry to hear about it.

Many of the fledgling writers encountered here are despairing and angry, they said, that their stories are being told, inadequately and inaccurately, only by the news media and civilian authors. One is Staff Sgt. José Torres, 27, from Lorain, Ohio, who was dreadfully injured in Nasiriya, Iraq, shortly after the war began and who has written, he said, some 200 pages describing the day that changed his life and its aftermath.

Staff Sergeant Torres is not a literary type; he relates the details of his ordeal evenly and undramatically, without the pace or practice of an accomplished storyteller but with an evident eagerness to make himself heard.

''I suffered a broken femur, shattered pelvis, my left buttock was blown completely off, I had open abdominal wounds,'' he said in an interview, adding that it took 22 operations to put him back together.

Amazingly, he still appears stocky and solid, though he walks with a limp. And he speaks with a breathtaking authenticity.

At one point, he said, when a septic tank exploded, he had to negotiate a field of excrement. It was a hardship, he said, ''not for the smell or having to crawl through it.''

''I couldn't care less,'' he continued. ''That's combat. But it's actually worse than mud to walk through. It's almost like quicksand. There's no turning in it.''

Another aspiring author is Julia Adams, a freelance journalist and a former marine herself, whose husband, Maj. Jim Adams -- his nickname is Rainman -- is a fighter pilot in Afghanistan. She's hoping to help him write about his experiences, she said.

''One thing we talk a lot about is the ability to live with killing,'' she said. ''It's something he grapples with, and he's been writing a journal. But there's a lot of stuff he didn't want to share with me while he was there.''

''Pilots compartmentalize,'' she continued. ''If a pilot opens up all those compartments, he can't fly. So what I want to know is, 'How can they delve into those feelings at a healthy level?' ''

Mr. Gioia, the chairman of the endowment, conceived the idea for the program about 18 months ago. The spur was a conversation he had had with Marilyn Nelson, a poet whose father was one of the Tuskegee airmen, as the first black fighter pilots in the United States were known, and who had just finished teaching a semester at West Point.

''A lot of her students were being shipped to Afghanistan,'' Mr. Gioia said by phone from California, where he was vacationing. ''And we began talking about how these kids are going off to be soldiers, and they really needed what literature offered. And we said, 'Wouldn't it be great if they had a chance to reflect on their experience?' ''

The endowment announced the program in April, including the plan to publish an anthology of war writing from Iraq and Afghanistan. (The book will be published next year.) The response was immediate: faxes from Iraq, phone calls and e-mail messages from military personnel around the globe.

''We got all this mail from veterans of Vietnam who told us how much they needed this,'' Mr. Gioia said. He added, ''The conversation will go wherever it needs to go, and I expect the writers to get as much out of this as the troops.''

And he's right, sort of. The visiting writers were all noticeably moved by the stories they heard and the attention they were given. But it's hard not to believe that the troops have more to gain. Consider Staff Sergeant Sparks, a well-spoken 31-year-old signals intelligence analyst from York, Pa., who spent six months in Iraq in 2003 and expects to be there again by the end of August. He's written on and off about his experience in the war, he said, but added that he was worried about expressing the kinds of feelings that he hadn't disclosed to anyone.

''There are a lot of feelings I had that I haven't spoken to my wife about, and I don't want to hurt her,'' he said. ''But they come out when I start to write.''

Still, he said, ''I feel a responsibility for something larger than myself.'' Reporters in Iraq, he said, are not telling the story as he sees it, are not telling his story, the story of his fellow marines.

''I'm disappointed there aren't more marines here today,'' Staff Sergeant Sparks said. ''As far as I can tell, most people feel the losses we're sustaining are acceptable losses until something happens to someone they know. Maybe if some of these marines could get out and write their stories, people wouldn't feel that way.''